Introduction

  • In a digital age where dashboards and real-time data exploration have become the norm, it’s remarkable that most of presentations still rely on the PowerPoint format, featuring static charts and visualizations
  • While these traditional slides have served us well for years, it’s time to embrace presentations that not only inform but actively engage audiences
  • Interactive presentations shine when the information you want to convey benefits from exploration, engagement, or dynamic data interaction
  • This means you can ask questions, analyze trends, and make decisions on the fly
  • That is especially useful in situation where one expects active engagement of with the audience, like Q&A sessions

On-Demand Information:

  • With hover interactions, the users can access additional information precisely when they need it,
    like in this case of summary statistics (boxplot displaying quartiles):

Clean and Uncluttered Design

  • Overlapping labels and excessive text can overwhelm viewers.
  • Hover-based information display lets users focus on the data they are interested in without distraction.

Reduced Cognitive Load

  • The reduction in cognitive load can lead to better comprehension and decision-making.
  • Dragging the cursor across allows to zoom in on a group of choice.

Time-Series Data:

  • For data that changes over time, interactive presentations can allow users to explore trends, anomalies, and correlations.
  • Zoom in on specific data points, highlight critical trends, and provide deeper insights when necessary.

Comparative Analysis

  • When you want to compare different scenarios, products, or regions, interactive presentations allow users to switch between options quickly
  • Click on the legend on the bottom of the chart to add or remove elements)

Output

  • The output file used for these interactive slides is a single .html document
  • The .html file can be sent by email or carried on a flash drive. All the data and visuals are already locally in the code, without need to be online to present it
  • HTML presentations work seamlessly across different platforms and devices, whether it’s a computer, tablet, or smartphone.

Types of content

  • Beyond various types of charts and graphs, interactive capabilities extend to maps, data tables, calendars, network graphs.

Interactive map

One interactive visualisations can replace multiple static images.

Interactive table

  • An interactive table enables the user to sort and filter data directly within the table, by a keyword, either in the whole table or on the level of columns.
  • Try typing “ITY” into the “Obj. Number” column, or “Ongoing” into the “Overall Progress” column.

Technology used

  • This interactive elements of this presentation are written in R language, a versatile programming language used for analyzing data, creating charts and graphs, and making data-driven decisions
  • To be more precise, the interactive elements are brought to live using series of R packages called htmlwidgets*, powerful technology in R that bridges the gap between R and JavaScript
  • The presentation is written in R Markdown interface, a user-friendly notebook format that combines plain text with code, allowing non-programmers and data professionals alike to create dynamic reports
  • R Markdown documents can be built into many different formats: PDF, Word (both static), html notebooks, whole books or websites

More information

  • To find out more about R language, R Markdown, htmlwidgets packaages, I include some links on the last slide
  • For easier reading, clicking here or changing the url to ** you can view a webpage version of this presentation (no slides) and by clicking here or changing the url to ** you can view the version with the R code chunks included
  • The whole source code is for this presentation is available at my Github page

P.S. If you are intrigued and would like me to try to create a presentation for you, send me your data (CSV, XLS, JSON) to “zdeno@zdebla.me”

Thank you